Tag Archives: toddlerhood

As many of you know, my son is 4 ½ years old. This is the latter stages of toddlerhood, but that doesn’t mean we still don’t deal with some of the bad attitudes and behaviors that toddlers exhibit. I’ll be honest, I’m a firstborn (if you haven’t read The Birth Order Book by Kevin Lehman, you need too) which means I’m very headstrong, legalistic and like to analyze everything. My son is also a firstborn, meaning he has many of the same traits I do. Needless to say, his attitude and behavior can easily wear me out as it’s like arguing with myself sometimes.

After doing some research online, I found a little information about attitude and behavior charts for kids and decided to try it out. Basically, all that this comprises of is drawing a chart with seven columns (one for each day of the week) and when I tell my son to do something and he does it with a good attitude or I tell him not to do something and he stops right when I tell him, he gets to put a smiley face (stamp) in the column for that day. Now, when he misbehaves or has a rotten attitude regarding something, he has to put a red X (stamp also) in the column.

At the end of each day, right before bed we count the number of smiley faces he has, write it down and then we add up the number of red X’s he has and write them. We subtract the number of X’s from the number of smiley faces and the total is how many “reward bucks” he earned for the day. I have a reward chart set up that has 10 different rewards listed on it – all worth different amounts of “reward …